What influence do investors have on company strategy?

Description

David Gurle, Founder and CEO of Symphony explain the relationships you should build with your investors that will help you shape your strategy.

Video Transcript

What influence do investors have on company strategy?

It depends on the people who are on your investment committee or on your board. It’s not because you have a brand x that does it necessarily means something about the influence they have in your company. The company is run by people. Despite all the attempts by AI programmers to replace us, we are still here. The relationship you build with your board and your advisors are really what will help you shape your strategy.

Mostly strategies come from CEO, Founder or from the co-founders. They go and run their idea to their board of investors or board of advisors, so this idea bouncing, the back and forth communication kind of shapes how you take everything to market. This is again, very much a function of the quality of the relationship that you have developed with your investors and also how open you are.

If you retain a lot, you’re not sharing a lot, if you’re not sharing a lot, they aren’t really able to understand every piece of the puzzle. So you have to have a degree of openness, as you go and deliver an idea so that they really can give you the full perspective, otherwise, you’re going to have a slice and this slice might not be as useful if they had the full picture.